TechnoTireuse

(en)
This is our project build page for The Deconstruction.
Here is the final build video and explanation video. We will also be posting a more thorough description of the various mechanisms involved in the project as soon as we find some time to write those up.

The goal of our Deconstruction build was to produce a machine that can be adapted to a portable beer-tap, and, given a certain amount of money, would serve us a nice fresh beer and bring it out to our table. We started on Friday and most of our materials came from a washing machine that we de-constructed with a rotary saw and hammers. The rest of the structure is built out of wood we had laying around, as well as some fencing for the wire. The electronics just used an Arduino UNO, a 12V relay, two contact switches, a servomotor and a windshield-wiper motor. All-in-all the build took the 7 of us about 36 hours, with most of the work being completed on Saturday afternoon, Friday night having been used for planning and some initial debugging (getting the washing-machine motor working, getting the coin-counter to talk to the Arduino etc.).

The first video is our 'trailer', and the second video is a more technical overview of how the machine works. We're going to try to put up some more juicy info soon, namely how to hook up the washing machine motor straight to mains voltage (220V for us), how we built the conveyor built etc.

Code for the project can be found on our github. It includes code for interfacing with the coin counter, as well as managing the beer-pour and cup-push.